China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites? 468
Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?
Already researched in 2002 ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements/ [harvard.edu]
Last Updated: September 24, 2002
On this basis: "Google censors itself for China" — http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm [bbc.co.uk] — Wednesday, 25 January 2006
Define ethics and business ethics within the context of a multi-billion dollar market. Do not be shy!
CC.
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:4, Informative)
Google may have a part of Baidu, but MS had a piece of Apple in the late 90s or 2000s as well (part of a lawsuit agreement IIRC) yet nobody could realisitically accuse MS on whether or not they cared if their OS remain dominant or if they wouldn't mind ceding market to Apple.
quite. (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work in China quite alot and found the only way I could get decent Internet access and get things done was to VPN back to the UK office and then surf from their gateway - the slight delay was quite alot better then the local service.
I got used to shitty performance, websites suddenly dying for no reason, 30 second delays on some sites and others almost instant.
As with most things Chinese, we may see this at dodgy behavior - to them it is a normal business practice. As I once stated on a thread about Chinese knockoffs the problem is not to "stop them doing it" but is rather "to make them understand they are doing something wrong in the first place".
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:2, Informative)
That's not technically true... You can own more than 50% of a Chinese company but you, as a foreigner, still can never have a controlling interest. It's funny how that works over there.
My stuff got copied (Score:5, Informative)
Voting and non-voting shares (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:4, Informative)
For a manufacturing company, you as a foreigner can own - and control - 100% of a company. For a technical/service firm, you can own 60%. For a trading company, you can own 40%. So it really depends upon what the type of company is.
China's also opened up so that foreigners can now outright own houses or apartments, something even Mexico doesn't allow...
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chinese "capitalism" is still largely an illusi (Score:4, Informative)
Karl Marx founded communism on materialist principles, not utopian ones. It doesn't mean all of his theories are correct, but they are not utopian. In fact he founded his school of thought in response to utopian socialist/communist ideologies of the time. I don't know how rational our system is with the president talking about God all the time and appealing to his base with his supposdely shared belief that some Jew 2000 years ago had magic powers.
Marxism is scientific insofar as it is consciously built on materialist, scientific notions. It is not scientific insofar as when it is incorrect. I would say even most educated Americans I know have no arguments against Marxian thought since they know nothing of it. They say "People will not act a certain way because human nature is..." or something like that which is never a scientific, rational argument. There are strong arguments against Marxian thought, but they are more along the lines of "Marx's economic system does not translate values to prices correctly". But most Americans, even educated ones, know too little about Marxism to make arguments against them.
Also, while Marx's socialism involves a proletariat-directed taking over of the economy by the state, there are other forms of socialism, like the anarcho-syndicalists who think economic decisions should be made by workers at their place of employment. Or people who advocate workers councils and so on. Many on the left question whether the USSR was what Marx intended, and Lenin himself talked about pulling away from socialism during the New Economic Policy. Only to Americans does socialism mean big government versus small government, in Europe it means who will control the "means of production".
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Voting and non-voting shares (Score:3, Informative)
In America they urge you to "Buy American". In China they put a gun to your head and tell you to buy Chinese apparently.
How cn government manipulate the DNS... (Score:3, Informative)
2. youtube is redirected to 6 rooms [6.cn], another idea copycat.
Re:I don't understand (Score:2, Informative)
Some real info (Score:5, Informative)
1. Foreign companies can own 100% of China enterprises (in some industries), and this is called a WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise)
2. For any company to operate a web site in China, they need an ICP (Internet Content Provider) license.
3. Only domestic PRC entities (citizens), can get an ICP license (any foreign ownership and ICP license cannot be issued)
4. There are ways around #2+#3, through a legal loophole which is quite simply, a) the foreign company has their in country manager or other domestic person setup a 100% domestic owned PRC company to get the ICP license. b) the foreign company has a proxy agreement and share pledge with the "official" shareholder(s) of that PRC domestic company which are side contracts giving control and management of the domestic company to the foreign owned (WOFE) of the foreign investors. c) The WOFE also has a contract with the PRC company to extract all revenue out through a "technical services and management agreements". d) The WOFE then is able to book all the revenue from the company, making it a synthetic subsidiary and thus getting around all the laws forbidding foreign investment in the PRC company. (interesting note, this structure was designed in the 70's to get around foreign investment limitations in petrochemical industries, and is now used by all the major internet and game companies listed abroad, ie: tom.com, sina.com, snda.com, Google, Yahoo etc.)
5. The telcos here (China Netcom and China Telecom) often seem to re-direct traffic as the post claims. I have seen google.com traffic redirected for an entire weekend to 114.cn, which is China Telecom's lame search engine! Baidu.com redirect I see much less often. There are also many others for instance ALL traffic was redirecting to Yahoo.cn on my cable broadband connection from my house yesterday, no idea why Yahoo.cn, but it was.
6. A lot of traffic to the China internet portal kings is fake, by fake think how gold farming in MMOGs works, people playing for gold and getting paid 0.50 cents an hour to play in China. I have heard *rumors* from insider friends saying that many portals pay people the equivalent to click on links all day.....think market cap and ad revenue reporting.....it would not surprise me in the least but I can't say I have seen it personally.
Re:Baidu part owned by Google, no? (Score:3, Informative)
Corruption is not limited to Chinese nationals (Score:5, Informative)
Take for example a large NASDAQ listed company, that was under internal investigation last year. I can't name names, but this is second hand knowledge from someone I know involved as a customer to this company and questioned in the investigation. Here goes:
1. NASDAQ listed company founders and management write a huge option on their shares with a foreign bank. The shares are in lockup and due to be able to float in 6 months. The price that the bank pays, is based on a price they can sell (estimated) at the end of the lockup period in 6 months.
2. Investigation begins, because of revenues being booked through companies the auditors (and competitors) have never heard of. It comes to light in the investigation, that the revenues are actually the proceeds from the share option sale (management and founders), to drive up stock price before the end of the lockup period.
3. Underwriters, major investors (big names in US and Europe, can't say the names here) are all aware. Auditors are paid off. One board seat is changed. The truth is buried. The news never comes out because too many investors, banks would get burned.
4. Stock still flying to this day. Fact is the company is a great model, but a big part of the accelerated growth prior to lockup expiring was fraud. Investors, bankers, underwriters knew it. Corruption on a mass scale involving US and European banks and investors.
So, this is why I call China "the wild east". Things can go very backward fast and it is very hard to see the "real" picture in anything you do here.
That being said, there are companies, like GE, that do very well in China while staying for the most part very "clean". It is not impossible to succeed in China without being corrupt. But the stories of corruption I have heard involving foreigners number at least on par with those involving locals only.............its a human disease not a "communist" or "socialist" or even "democratic" problem.....its human.
Re:Voting and non-voting shares (Score:2, Informative)
Back to the issue at hand: while I haven't experienced the website redirecting scam described above, there's nothing to make me believe the Chinese government wouldn't do something like that in order to boost a Chinese company. I personally believe their blocks on blog sites and recently-lifted YouTube block are done in part to force Chinese citizens to use domestic companies which can be more easily monitored and controlled.